For telecommunications and other networking providers, network reliability is important. In most situations, carrier class equipment such as network switches should be operational 99.999% of the time such equipment is employed with a network. If equipment fails, customers telephone calls can be dropped, data can be corrupted, and the service provider suffers in the eyes of the consumer.
Currently, media stream processors are now being produced that can handle thousands of telephone calls or other data streams at the same time. This means that a failure in such processors can result in the loss of hundreds if not thousands of telephone calls or data streams. As such, redundancy may be employed to ensure that this does not happen. Unfortunately, full redundancy is still quite expensive for those carriers that have a large number of switches to upgrade. Also, given that a large number of telephone calls or other media streams that are facilitated by a single switch, it takes an unacceptably long period of time to switch all active calls or data streams to a redundant switch upon failure of a primary switch.